Organization and Regulation

Singer Janet Jackson drew large fines from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission for her performance in the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show, in which she, through the assistance of her singing partner, Justin Timberlake, exposed most of one of her breasts. The FCC imposed a $550,000 fine on CBS for the Super Bowl flashing incident, a levy the network contested on the grounds that it had no advance knowledge of the singer’s plans regarding the costume. Although the move appeared to many observers to have been intentional, Timberlake claimed the exposure was the result of a “wardrobe malfunction.” The incident cast a veil of caution over TV for the rest of the year. When the ABC network scheduled an airing of an uncensored version of Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning World War II film Saving Private Ryan on Veterans Day, more than 60 affiliates declined to carry it, including those in Boston, Atlanta, Ga., Detroit, and Dallas, Texas. They did not want to take the risk of being fined for indecency for the occasional occurrences of obscene language in the movie. In that same month, ABC took heat for a sexually suggestive promotion that ran in advance of a Monday Night Football telecast and showed Nicollette Sheridan, star of the ABC series Desperate Housewives, wearing only a towel and attempting to seduce Philadelphia Eagles star Terrell Owens into not playing in that night’s game. In response to thousands of viewer complaints, the FCC considered whether to impose fines. In November Viacom, Inc., parent company of CBS, agreed to pay the FCC a $3.5 million fine that regulators had imposed for indecent TV and radio programming apart from the Jackson incident.

Comcast Corp., the leading American cable operator, attempted to acquire Disney, parent of ABC, as a programming-content wing, but the $54 billion bid that the Philadelphia-based company made for Disney was rebuffed. NBC worked to make a coherent single entity out of its takeover of Vivendi Universal, which was completed in May. The new company, NBC Universal, established single sales, marketing, and publicity departments over all of its television networks: NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, Telemundo, and Bravo as well as former Universal companies USA Network, Sci Fi Channel, and Trio. The synergy worked during the telecast of the Olympic Games from Athens; the Games were shown across many NBC Universal networks, which gave viewers multiple options for coverage.

Reelection campaign advertisements for Pres. George W. Bush on American TV made reference to the Olympics, and International Olympic Committee officials objected on the grounds that it was a political use of the name. The ads, which highlighted the Olympic participation of Iraq and Afghanistan as “two more free nations,” aired on MSNBC, CNBC, and other NBC cable networks during the broadcast of the Athens Olympics.

Australian-born American Rupert Murdoch planned to move the headquarters of News Corp. to New York. In the second quarter net profit rose 7.8%, mainly from TV ($351 million), cable ($154 million), and newspaper ($144 million) affiliates. Brazil’s antitrust regulator CADE (Administrative Council of Economic Defense) imposed conditions on the acquisition of Hughes Electronics by News Corp., which gave News Corp. a monopoly of satellite TV markets in Latin America.

Canal Plus Netherlands, which offered digital pay-TV via satellite, cable, and digital video broadcasting, was bought from Vivendi by Dutch firms Greenfield Capital Partners and Airbridge Investments. Britain’s biggest commercial free-to-air TV broadcaster ITV PLC became the majority shareholder of breakfast-TV producer GMTV after acquiring another 25% of its stock. ITV was formed by the merger of Granada and Carlton, each of which owned 25% of GMTV. The German cartel office opposed cable-TV operator Kabel Deutschland’s takeover plans of three regional cable-network operators, Ish (Cologne), Iesy (Frankfurt), and Kabel Baden-Württemberg (Heidelberg). Pursuant to the German Takeover Act, Viacom (owner of MTV Networks Europe) published in June its intention to acquire 75.8% of Viva Media AG. In November TDC, a leading telecommunications company in Denmark, acquired Swedish broadband company Song Networks Holding AB, which was to be renamed TDC Song.

Galaxy Satellite Broadcasting’s Jim Blomfield resigned in August amid rumours of international satellite operator Intelsat’s pullout from the joint venture with Hong Kong’s Television Broadcasts Ltd. Lenovo Group Ltd., China’s leading personal computer maker, formed a multimedia venture with Sun Media Investment Holdings Ltd., the private-investment firm of popular TV program host (and company chairman) Yang Lan and her husband, Bruno Wu Zheng. TV Tokyo traded on the Tokyo Stock Exchange with an initial public offering of 3.79 million shares. Tokyo Regional Taxation Bureau ordered Nippon Television Network to pay ¥90 million (about $850,000) in additional taxes and penalties for having failed to declare taxable income over a three-year period ended March 31, 2003.

Australia’s media ownership bill was not dealt with by Parliament “due to a backlog of bills in the Senate upper house.” Communications Minister Darryl Williams had reintroduced the bill in November 2003 and had argued that the growth of the sector was being limited by an outmoded regulatory framework.

Programming

The most popular show in American television programming at the end of the 2003–04 TV season in May was the CBS crime drama CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, and it retained that rank in the first months of the next season. Emmy Awards went to HBO’s The Sopranos, a first-time winner for outstanding dramatic series, and to the first-year Fox show Arrested Development, the winner for outstanding comedy. The big fall hit was ABC’s Desperate Housewives, a campy soap opera about lithe and licentious women on a comfy suburban block. The series rapidly became one of TV’s top-three shows in all key demographic groups. Such a rapid ascent was surprising for any TV series in the cable-and-Internet era, but it was especially surprising for a scripted series. Desperate Housewives brought new hope to near-desperate writers, agents, and actors; all of the instant ratings successes in recent years had come from so-called reality series, and this led to a kind of panic in Hollywood’s creative community. NBC could not parlay its Olympics success into fall-season ratings. The massive hit sitcom Friends retired in May, and after the first couple of months of the 2004–05 TV season, the network was losing ground in the most valuable viewer demographic (18–49-year-old adults) for the first time in a decade. The network was hurt when The Apprentice, the surprise early-year reality hit that featured real-estate developer Donald Trump (seeBiographies) as he led would-be acolytes through business challenges, did not fare as well in its fall edition.

Two lions of network television news retired in 2004. Don Hewitt stepped down as executive producer of CBS’s venerable 60 Minutes, the pioneering newsmagazine he founded in 1968, and NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw gave up his anchor chair, yielding to Brian Williams. With the announcement by CBS News anchor Dan Rather that he would retire in 2005, only ABC’s Peter Jennings remained of the longtime big-three TV-network anchors. Also retiring in 2004 was respected TV journalist Bill Moyers. Because of the rise of cable news and the shrinking of the audience for network news, it was widely believed that the next generation of news anchors would cast much shorter shadows. Rather had found himself in the eye of a political firestorm because of a story he reported during the 2004 presidential campaign. His report, for the spinoff program 60 Minutes Wednesday, alleged that President Bush’s National Guard service in the early 1970s had been spotty, at best. The story, however, was based on alleged National Guard documents that CBS was forced to admit had not been properly authenticated. A panel was appointed by CBS to investigate the blunder.

The commercial arm of the BBC partnered with digital broadcaster Japan MediArk Co., and on December 1 they launched BBC Japan, an entertainment channel that ran programming specifically developed for the Japanese audience. In Great Britain the BBC announced that its digital terrestrial TV service Freeview was reaching four million homes with integrated digital TV (iDTV). The BBC, BSkyB, and Crown Castle International made up the Freeview consortium. In April BBC news reporters began attending two-hour seminars on impartial journalism following criticisms by the Hutton Report on the coverage of the death of scientist David Kelly. BBC World, the BBC’s 24-hour international news and information channel, won Best News Channel in the seventh HOT BIRD TV awards. The awards were held in Venice on October 2 and were broadcast by Eutelsat, one of the world’s largest satellite operators.

UKTV Style’s Watching Paint Dry treated viewers to the opportunity to watch different kinds of paint dry on an empty shop wall each day and asked them to vote online for their favourite paint. With guidance from fertility expert Allen Pacey of the University of Sheffield, Eng., the BBC televised a sperm race as part of the educational Lab Rats series on BBC Three. The race between the sperm of scientist Mike Leahy and comedian Zeron Gibson took place in glass capillary tubes and was shown by means of a microscope connected to a big screen. (Gibson’s won.) Vee-TV, Britain’s Channel 4 program for the deaf, decided to exclude offensive signs characterizing homosexuals, ethnic groups, and racial minorities from its sign language. Britain’s Office of Fair Trading branded as illegal the collective sale of TV media rights for horse racing at 49 racecourses to a joint venture of Arena Leisure, BSkyB, and Channel 4 called Attheraces. English premier league association football (soccer) was broadcast by BSkyB, but in agreement with European competition regulators, it sublicensed rights for several games. Sportech launched ahead of Euro 2004 Littlewoods Bet Direct, the only fixed-odds betting service available 24 hours a day and seven days a week within ITV’s interactive menu. Meanwhile, the Ligue de Football Professionnel of France launched the auction of broadcasting rights to its top matches over the following three years. Fierce competition erupted between rights holder Canal Plus and Television Par Satellite, the digital TV platform of Television Francaise 1 SA and M6-Metropole TV. Shows on Iraqi TV’s al-Sharqiya channel were becoming popular. One program, Ration Card, randomly drew the national ration-card number of an Iraqi citizen. Producers then showed up on the winner’s doorstep and handed over $1,000.

Mexico’s Grupo Televisa SA changed the name of its global unit to Televisa Estudios and added licensing and merchandising services for video and DVD products. Colombia’s Caracol network signed a five-year distribution contract with DirecTV, which also started to beam Puerto Rican programming from WAPA America as part of its Para Todos service on September 1.

Among other TV-related stories worldwide, a six-episode Thai TV show called Nok Hunt was staged by new budget airline Nok Air to choose 10 flight attendants from among 20 applicants who underwent several tests. A New Delhi woman set fire to herself because her husband and three children were glued to the India-Pakistan cricket series on TV. In Manitoba a 20-year-old was jailed for having hurled a bagful of vomit and feces inside a Winnipeg bus, similar to an episode on the MTV show Jackass. German news service Deutsche Welle celebrated its 10th year online with reports in the Star Trek–based Klingon language (created by linguist Marc Okrand).

Technology

Television technology marched forward aggressively in 2004 as high-definition television (HDTV) and various services for time-shifting programs made a push toward the mainstream. “Consumers will have more flexibility over what they watch and when they watch it,” said Phillip Swann, president of TVPredictions.com. Swann pegged growing usage of HDTV, digital video recorders (DVRs) such as TiVo, and on-demand video service as the year’s most important TV trends.

Although HDTV remained a prohibitively expensive proposition for most consumers, prices for the necessary equipment began to decline significantly in 2004, and the number of high-definition programs that were being offered grew. The telecasting of sports was a key factor in driving the growth, experts said. For example, Cox Cable in San Diego, Calif., saw its “take rate” for high-definition services jump 40% after San Diego Padres baseball games began to be offered in the new, more vivid format.

The use of DVRs, long predicted as the wave of TV’s future, finally began to climb in 2004, largely because cable-TV operators began to offer them packaged inside their cable boxes. This arrangement was simpler than TiVo’s, which typically required users to purchase and install a separate audio-video appliance. Independent industry analysts predicted that the number of DVR-equipped homes would explode from 7 million at the end of 2004 to some 30 million, or close to one-third of American households, within four years. Also popular were new video-on-demand cable-TV services, which allowed a user to call up an episode of HBO’s The Sopranos, for example, from an on-screen menu and watch it immediately rather than wait for the show to appear on the regular HBO schedule. The two technologies together were forcing networks and advertising agencies to rethink the traditional 30-second TV advertisement.

On the basis of its tracking of DVR usage by its 800,000 customers, TiVo revealed that the most-watched Olympic moment was gymnast Paul Hamm’s high-bar performance. The most-replayed Super Bowl moment was Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction.” In October Nielsen Media Research, the company that provided the Nielsen ratings, began culling data on DVR use from 5,000–10,000 TiVo households that had agreed to participate. TiVo faced off against operators that provided cable and satellite services with DVR functions. Hollywood studios and the U.S. National Football League blocked TiVo from allowing its subscribers to transfer recorded shows to other devices, but TiVo and Netflix agreed to develop a service for customers to rent videos by downloading them through TiVo.

Microsoft Corp. unveiled MSN TV2, made by Thomson for RCA, which offered a subscription package that included MSN, NBC, Discovery Channel, and Fox Sports. At the same time, Microsoft introduced the new Windows XP Media Center software, which made it possible for a PC to function as a photo album, jukebox, DVD player, TV receiver, and DVR.

In August Toshiba introduced Qosmio, the first laptop integrated with audio and video features, DVD drive, TV tuner with a no-waiting TV mode, enhanced speakers, and near-TV-quality display. The Samsung MM-A700 cellphone used MobiTV technology to function as a TV. It could show news updates, sports clips, weather forecasts, music videos, and cartoons from 14 cable stations of streaming video provided by the Sprint network. Samsung also launched HDTV with a picture-enhancing feature called DNIe (digital natural image engine). Ahead of the holidays personal computer giant Dell released its first plasma-screen TV. It had released its first LCD (liquid-crystal display) TV in December 2003. Sharp, Japan’s top maker of LCD panels, announced its latest product, a 114-cm (45-in) LCD TV, to keep up with demands for 102-cm (40-in) or larger flat TVs. Earlier, it had introduced the world’s first wireless flat-panel TV, the Aquos LC-15L1U-S, with a 38-cm (15-in) display screen and built-in battery.

Patients in 32 British hospitals complained about TV sets in their rooms having no “off” switch. Even when they refused to subscribe, the TVs blared ads for the service and messages from hospital authorities. Television service, installed by private firm Patientline, cost patients $5.75 per day.

Radio

Air America, a new liberal radio network intended to counter the prevailing right-wing themes of American talk radio, signed on in March 2004 with comic Al Franken as its marquee host. Also cohosting a show was comedian and actress Janeane Garofalo. Despite the abundance of news in an election year, the network had startup woes. It quickly lost its Chicago outlet, piled up debt, and within the first three months underwent a corporate restructuring. By year’s end, however, Air America had more than 40 outlets, including some owned by the giant Clear Channel conglomerate, and it was proving popular with young-adult listeners. Much like Howard Stern’s show, Franken’s show was also turned into a regular telecast, on cable TV’s Sundance Channel.

Meanwhile, Stern, the popular New York-based talk host, was preparing to abandon over-the-air radio for the new medium of satellite radio. (SeeSidebar.) Fed up with what he considered to be harassment in the form of fines from an FCC that was newly vigilant about what it termed indecency, Stern opted to sign with Sirius Satellite Radio, one of two competitors in the emerging satellite arena. With a contract said to be valued at $500 million and scheduled to start in 2006, Stern brought new credibility to a medium that had struggled to attract listeners.

Also helping satellite was the arrival of Bob Edwards, the longtime host of NPR’s flagship Morning Edition broadcast. Edwards began hosting an eponymous interview show on XM Satellite Radio in October, five months after NPR pushed him out of the hosting chair. NPR’s demotion of Edwards, less than a year shy of his 25th anniversary as host, proved wildly unpopular with listeners, who logged more than 30,000 protests, according to the public-radio programming service. NPR management said the move was undertaken to inject new life into the morning broadcast but later admitted that they had badly mishandled the departure. Nonetheless, at year’s end the levels of listener donations to local NPR stations did not seem to be showing any long-term effects of the Edwards affair, according to company officials. NPR continued to gain listeners, a popularity boom that many analysts interpreted as an audience reaction to the increasing homogenization of commercial radio. Its share of radio listeners had grown fivefold in two decades, to more that 5% of the total radio audience in the U.S. A record $236 million bequest in 2003 from Joan Kroc, widow of McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc, had the radio service planning to hire many new reporters, including some to fill in news beats it considered to be inadequately covered, such as the media.

In commercial radio a second successive year of little to no advertising growth had the big broadcasters scrambling for solutions. The big two, Clear Channel and Infinity, decided to trim the number of commercials aired per hour in an attempt to make the time more valuable and reduce listener ad fatigue. Both Clear Channel Communications and the Viacom conglomerate, which owned Infinity, made moves to boost their influence in the growing Hispanic radio market. Viacom bought 10% of the Spanish Broadcasting System, and Clear Channel announced plans to convert 20 to 25 of its stations to Hispanic formats.

Radio Arman (“Radio Hope”), Afghanistan’s first privately owned independent FM radio station, was begun in 2003 by the Mohseni brothers Saad, Zaid, and Jahed. In 2004 it was broadcasting 24 hours a day, seven days a week, a mix of talk shows, traffic updates, and music—Indian, Western, Arabic, and Afghani. A hit with young Afghans, the disc jockeys were aged 19 to 25, and half of them were women. In September Radio Arman launched a talent search for new Afghan superstars. Four winners recorded CDs for promotion on the air.

Established by the British in 1954, Radio Uganda celebrated its golden jubilee in September. For a time Radio Uganda had been overshadowed by newer FM stations in Kampala, and high-powered shortwave transmitters at the station eventually fell into disuse. Using satellite links, Radio Uganda later came to reach the whole country. Developments in radio programming facilitated the promotion of Uganda’s amnesty program, particularly on Mega FM, the most popular station in northern Uganda. Its well-known program Dwogpaco (“Come Back Home”) featured ex-LRA (Lord’s Resistance Army) members asking their fellow combatants to surrender. The show was conducted in the language of the Acholi, the largest ethnic group in the area. The show was also broadcast on Radio Juba in The Sudan, where many LRA members were still based. During the launching of the Radio Uganda Listeners Association on the occasion of Radio Uganda’s golden jubilee, the minister of state for information, James Nsaba Buturo, announced the merger of Radio Uganda and Uganda Television.

Imprisoned murderer Jiri Kajinek was paid to star in an advertising campaign by Czech pop station Kiss Radio. Some 500 billboards showed 43-year-old Kajinek wearing headphones under the slogan “Radio for life.” Kajinek had become a local legend when he escaped from a maximum-security prison and evaded recapture for more than a month.